The Witness

By MARK GEVISSER

Published: June 22, 1997

For more than a year now, South Africa has been exposed to daily revelations about its traumatic history. In hearing rooms all over the country, people have been telling their stories to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, established by an act of Parliament to promote ''reconciliation'' among the races and to coax the truth out about apartheid by offering amnesty to those willing to confess their crimes.

The commission has received 10,000 statements charging gross violations of human rights -- murder and torture -- and nearly 7,000 applications for amnesty. It has become, in a way, a national town meeting on South Africa's past. A black mother brings a handful of her murdered son's hair to the witness stand; she does not know where his body is. A woman tells about the morning she realized her missing husband, a prominent activist, was dead; the hearing-room audience rises spontaneously and begins singing the African National Congress's funeral hymn for dead soldiers: ''What have we done? What have we really done?''

The witnesses weep often, and when Bishop Desmond Tutu is presiding, he often weeps with them. Those seeking amnesty, by contrast, recite their crimes in an affectless monotone: the legislation does not require them to show contrition. They seek amnesty only to avoid prosecution.

Several families of murdered activists, including that of Steve Biko, have tried to stop the commission's work because they say the amnesty system denies them their right to see justice done through a criminal trial. Bishop Tutu insists, however, that the process remains ''the only alternative to Nuremberg on the one hand and amnesia on the other.'' And he reminds his listeners that because South Africa came to a negotiated settlement, Nuremberg-style prosecutions are not an option.

The commission's amnesty process has done one thing the criminal justice system could never have achieved: it has ferreted out the truth. ''We want to forgive,'' said the teen-aged daughter of a murdered activist at the beginning of the hearings last year. ''But we don't know who to forgive.'' She will soon: her father's murderers have applied for amnesty, and they will testify in September.

In the next few months, the amnesty applications of senior-level apartheid politicians and security officials will be heard, and they will make a mockery of former President F. W. de Klerk's repeated assertion that the atrocities were the work of a few ''bad eggs.'' When the commission hands its report to President Mandela next year, the hope is that the investigations will prove that the assassinations of black leaders and the widespread use of torture were sanctioned at the highest level of the state.

De Klerk has recently thrown the ''reconciliation'' process into jeopardy by refusing to cooperate with the commission and threatening to sue it for ''not being impartial.'' How could it be otherwise when one side was fighting a just war and the other was not? The commission is impelled to look at human rights abuses on both sides: the government that imposed apartheid and the liberation movements that fought to eliminate it. But whether you use a moral or a literal scale, the crimes of the former far outweigh those of the latter. De Klerk's response is emblematic of most white South Africans, who have been shocked by the evidence (''We never knew!'') but have never taken responsibility for the acts committed in their name. Truth, as all South Africans are discovering, is not the same as justice. They are also learning that its relationship to reconciliation is far more complex than they imagined.

MHLELI MXENGE
AND DIRK COETZEE

The Commander of South Africa's notorious Vlakplaas police death squad, Dirk Coetzee ordered the brutal 1981 killing of Griffiths Mxenge, a human rights lawyer, who was stabbed 40 times in a simulated robbery. (Mxenge's brother Mhleli holds a portrait of Mxenge and his wife, also killed several years later.) Coetzee was convicted of the murder, but has applied for amnesty from the Truth Commission for that and other killings. ''I will have to live with my conscience for the rest of my life and with the fact that I killed innocent people,'' he said at an amnesty hearing in November. ''In all honesty, I don't expect the Mxenge family to forgive me.'' The family does not. ''The system is so completely in the interests of the perpetrators that it denies the victims their rights to justice,'' Mhleli Mxenge said. ''They say offering amnesty helps the truth come out. But I don't believe that knowing alone makes you happy. Once you know who did it, you want the next thing -- you want justice!''

THEMBINKOSI TSHABE AND MXOLISI GOBOZA

At 19 and 15 years old, Tshabe and Goboza are among the youngest witnesses to have testified before the Truth Commission. They were shot and wounded by police officers in 1993 while taking part in a student demonstration that turned into a riot in a rural town in Free State Province. The demonstrators had been trying to force the white school in town to integrate. ''The police were shooting everybody, even the people who were not students,'' Tshabe testified last October. ''The students were fighting for their rights because we didn't have enough classes and the Boers refused when we tried to negotiate. The Boers refused to listen to us.'' Tshabe still has pellets embedded in his body. He told the commission that he hopes to be a nurse. Goboza said that he wishes to be a prison warden.

SINGQOKWANA ERNEST MALGAS

Wheelchair-bound partly as a result of injuries from torture, Malgas is an A.N.C. veteran who lives in semi-destitute conditions in Port Elizabeth's New Brighton township. During the 14 years he spent imprisoned on Robben Island, his house was repeatedly fire-bombed; in one of these attacks his son was burned to death with acid. When Malgas gave testimony in April 1996, he at first avoided describing his ordeal in prison. But under repeated questioning, he finally gave details of his torture, breaking down and trying to cover the ''shame'' of his tears with his hands. Malgas told the commission that he would like to say to his torturers, ''If we were only going to get freedom over our dead bodies, I'd like to make them aware we've got freedom.''

The Rev. MICHAEL LAPSLEY

A chaplain and activist with the African National Congress, Father Lapsley lost an eye and both hands to a letter bomb in 1991 believed to have been sent by a Government death squad. ''In my mind there was somebody obviously who typed my name on an envelope, also a woman or a man who made that bomb, who created it,'' Father Lapsley testified in June 1996. ''And I have often asked the question about the person who made it and the person who typed my name. What did they tell their children that they did that day? But I believe responsibility increases the higher you go up the chain of command. I have always been clear that the person I hold responsible for my bombing is F. W. de Klerk. He was the head of state, and the death squads remained part of the machinery of the state.''

JOYCE MTIMKHULU

After being given a near-fatal dose of rat poison while in detention in 1982 and then sent home, Siphiwe Mtimkhulu, a 21-year-old student activist, disappeared. Last year security police officers confessed to his murder. His mother, Joyce Mtimkhulu, who testified in June 1996, brought a handful of his hair that had fallen out after he came back from prison. ''This is Siphiwe's hair,'' she said. ''I want the commission to witness what I've brought here today so that they should know the effect of the poison thatwas used on my son. I thought I would make burial of my son through his hair, but by God's will I didn't, as if I knew I would be here today.''

ROBERT MCBRIDE

Robert McBride, an A.N.C. operative, was sentenced to death for the 1986 murder of three people blown up by a car bomb he planted outside a bar on the Durban beachfront. He was released in 1992, and is now a senior civil servant in Mandela's Government. Earlier this year he applied for amnesty. ''After the bombing, the thing that shocked me the most was seeing a photo of a child whose mother was killed,'' he said in an interview. ''My immediate reaction was to be obsessed with doing sabotage operations so that I could get rid of apartheid as quickly as possible, because the way I saw it, apartheid was responsible for the tragedy. I'm truly sorry that I caused those three deaths, but this sadness cannot be seen in isolation from the pain and death that apartheid caused to millions of innocent South Africans. . . . Allied soldiers, who bombed entire cities and killed hundreds and thousands of civilians, never had to say, 'We're sorry for defeating evil.' ''

SINDISWA MKHONTO AND NOMONDE CALATA

Sparrow Mkhonto and Fort Calata were leading anti-apartheid activists in Cradock, a town in the Eastern Cape. In June 1985, they went with two others to a meeting and never returned. The mutilated bodies of the ''Cradock Four'' were found the following week, and their mass funeral became the catalyst for the declaration of the first State of Emergency. Sindiswa Mkhonto and Nomonde Calata, two of the widows, still live in Cradock. Testifying in April 1996, Calata described realizing that her husband was dead the day after he didn't return home: ''Usually The Herald was delivered at home because I was distributing it. . . . I looked at the headlines, and one of the children said that he could see that his father's car was shown in the paper as being burned. At that moment I was trembling because I was afraid of what might have happened to my husband, because I wondered, If his car was burned like this, what might have happened to him?'' Operatives from the security police and from the South Africa Defense Force have applied for amnesty for the murders.

GENERAL MAGNUS MALAN

As Minister of Defense from 1980 to 1991, General Malan approved counterinsurgencies in Mozambique and Angola, planned the States of Emergency and set up the notorious ''Civil Cooperation Bureau'' -- a covert agency responsible for disinformation and assassination. Last year, Malan was charged with the murder of 13 civilians, shot by a group of hit men. Despite compelling proof that the Defense Force had trained them, Malan was acquitted because of a lack of evidence linking him to the massacre. He decided not to apply for amnesty, but volunteered to testify and became the first apartheid-era politician to accept responsibility for all acts by forces under his command. ''Unless the different population groups of South Africa become truly reconciled, our country does not have a realistic hope of overcoming the challenges facing all South Africans, irrespective of race or creed,'' he told the Truth Commission last month. ''Should we permit ourselves to become obsessed with the past, insisting on opening old wounds and becoming ever more divided, we will all lose what we have in this wonderful country of ours.''